For what it is, very funny, very insightful, and very well done. But it would be nice if Kline were a bit less myopic.
A lighthearted intervention into America’s discussion about child-care.
Kline is the founder of White House Nannies Inc., which provides cabinet secretaries and the press corps with their child-care. She tells war stories from her years matching up kiddie caretakers with the nation’s powerbrokers. At the center of it all is high-profile newscaster Janette Huntington (presumably a composite). She called Kline days before the birth of her son because the nanny she’d engaged had just quit, opting for a post that came with bigger closets in the nanny suite. (Good nannies can find themselves outfitted with a Porsche, monthly spa days and a trip to the Caribbean, all in the interest of keeping that most crucial member of the household happy.) Kline was able to find the perfect match—hard-working, devoted Emma—and gives over much of the text to describing the first few years of baby Huntington’s life, during which he spent far more waking hours with the nanny than with mom and pop. Such seeming success stories alternate with outrageous vignettes about nutty parents and demanding nannies who all enter therapy to deal with the stress of fast-paced living. The parents portrayed here are desperate to do their best for the kids, but their best translates into excellent child-care, not time with their children. “Family togetherness is rarer than a Japanese cherry tree in bloom in Washington. In January,” Klein avers. That’s as close to a critique as she gets—of course, too robust a critique would undermine her business. But the failure to engage larger questions is a major flaw here. Does this remote-control parenting have any detrimental affects on kids? What about all those parents who work not because they want fulfillment, but because they want to keep food on the table, who can’t afford the $750 per week for White House Nannies Inc.?
For what it is, very funny, very insightful, and very well done. But it would be nice if Kline were a bit less myopic.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-58542-410-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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